The Documentary Film Reader

History, Theory, Criticism

Edited by Jonathan Kahana and Foreword by Charles Musser

Provides the most comprehensive overview of documentary film assembled to date, with over 100 articles on myriad topics

Features a substantial main introduction and section introductions throughout to establish key contexts and important critical issues

Ranges widely across continents, filmmakers, and subgenres, addressing early documentary, avant-garde, propaganda, the essay film, and more

Proposes a fresh canon of films and texts as a starting point for further exploration into the world of nonfiction cinema

Includes foreword from the renowned film historian and filmmaker Charles Musser

The Documentary Film Reader

History, Theory, Criticism

Edited by Jonathan Kahana and Foreword by Charles Musser

Description

Bringing together an expansive range of writing by scholars, critics, historians, and filmmakers, The Documentary Film Reader presents an international perspective on the most significant developments and debates from several decades of critical writing about documentary. Each of the book's seven sections covers a distinct period in the history of documentary, collecting both contemporary and retrospective views of filmmaking in the era. And each section is prefaced by an introductory essay that explains its design and provides critical context. Painstakingly selected from the archives of more than a hundred years of cinema practice and theory, the essays, reviews, interviews, manifestos, and ephemera gathered in this volume suit the needs and interests of the beginning student, the advanced scholar, the casual reader, and the working documentarian.

The Documentary Film Reader

History, Theory, Criticism

Edited by Jonathan Kahana and Foreword by Charles Musser

Table of Contents

Foreword by Charles MusserIntroduction

I. Early Documentary: From the Illustrated Lecture to the Factual FilmJonathan Kahana, Introduction to Section IRick Altman, "From Lecturer's Prop to Industrial Product: The Early History of Travel Films" (2006)Anonymous, "Burton Holmes Pleases a Large Audience at the Columbia" (1905)Kristen Whissel, "Placing the Spectator on the Scene of History: Modern Warfare and the Battle Reenactment at the Turn of the Century" (2008)Dai Vaughan, "Let There Be Lumière" (1999)Boleslas Matuszewski, "A New Source of History" (1898)Tom Gunning, "Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the 'View' Aesthetic" (1997)Edward Curtis et al., "The Continental Film Company" (1912)W. Stephen Bush, "In The Land of the Head Hunters" (1914)Catherine Russell, "Playing Primitive" (1999) Anonymous, "Movies of Eskimo Life Win Much Appreciation" (1915)Anonymous, "Nanook of the North" (1922)John Grierson, "Flaherty's Poetic Moana" (1926)John Grierson, "Flaherty" (1931-32) Hamid Naficy, "Lured by the East: Ethnographic and Expedition Films about Nomadic Tribes; The Case of Grass" (2006)Béla Balázs, "Compulsive Cameramen" (1925)Anonymous, "New Films Make War Seem More Personal" (1916)Nicholas Reeves, "Cinema, Spectatorship, and Propaganda: Battle of the Somme (1916) and Its Contemporary Audience" (1997)

III: Documentary Propaganda: World War II and the Post-WarCitizenJonathan Kahana, Introduction to Section IIIJames Agee, Review of Iwo Jima newsreels (1945)James Agee, Review of San Pietro (1945)Thomas Cripps and David Culbert, "The Negro Soldier (1944): Film Propaganda in Black and White" (1979)André Bazin, "On Why We Fight: History, Documentation, and the Newsreel" (1946)Jim Leach, "The Poetics of Propaganda: Humphrey Jennings and Listen to Britain" (1998)George C. Stoney, "Documentary in the United States in the Immediate Post-World War II Years" (1989)Zoë Druick, "Documenting Citizenship: Reexamining the 1950s National Film Board Films about Citizenship" (2000)Srirupa Roy, "Moving Pictures: The Films Division of India and the Visual Practices of the Nation-State" (2007)Jennifer Horne, "Experiments in Propaganda: Reintroducing James Blue's Colombian Trilogy" (2009)Peter Watkins with James Blue and Michael Gill, "Peter Watkins Discusses His Suppressed Nuclear Film The War Game" (1965)

IV. Aesthetics of Liberation: Free, Direct, and Vérité CinemasJonathan Kahana, Introduction to Section IVJean Painlevé, "The Castration of Documentary" (1953)Jean Cocteau, "On Blood of the Beasts" (1963)Lindsay Anderson, "Free Cinema" (1957)Tom Whiteside, "The One-Ton Pencil" (1962)Edgar Morin, "Chronicle of a Film" (1962)Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Radical Humanism and the Coexistence of Film and Poetry in The House is Black" (2003)Jean Rouch with Dan Georgakas, Udayan Gupta, and Judy Janda, "The Politics of Visual Anthropology" (1977)Ricky Leacock, "For an Uncontrolled Cinema" (1961)Bruce Elder, "On the Candid-Eye Movement" (1977)Jonas Mekas, "To Mayor Lindsay / On Film Journalism and Newsreels" (1966)Jeanne Hall, "Realism as a Style in Cinema Verite: A Critical Analysis of Primary" (1991)Margaret Mead, "As Significant as the Invention of Drama or the Novel" (1973)

VI. Truth Not Guaranteed: Reflections, Revisions, and ReturnsEditor's section introductionRobert Sklar, "Documentary: Artifice in the Service of Truth" (1975)Jonas Mekas, "The Diary Film (A Lecture on Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania)" (1972)Chick Strand, "Notes on Ethnographic Film by a Film Artist" (1978)Michael Renov, "Toward a Poetics of Documentary" (1993)Trinh T. Minh-ha, "Mechanical Eye, Electronic Ear and the Lure of Authenticity" (1984)Brian Winston, "The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary" (1988)J. Hoberman, "Shoah: The Being of Nothingness" (1985-86)Claude Lanzmann with Marc Chevrie and Hervé Le Roux, "Site and Speech: An Interview with Claude Lanzmann about Shoah" (1985)Linda Williams, "Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary" (1993)Peter Bates, "Truth Not Guaranteed: An Interview with Errol Morris" (1989)Harlan Jacobson with Michael Moore, "Michael & Me" (1989)Thomas Waugh, "'Acting to Play Oneself': Notes on Performance in Documentary" (1990)Phillip Brian Harper, "Marlon Riggs: The Subjective Position of Documentary Video" (1995)Paula Rabinowitz, "Melodrama/Male Drama: The Sentimental Contract of American Labor Films" (2002)Marsha Orgeron and Devin Orgeron, "Familial Pursuits, Editorial Acts: Documentaries After the Age of Home Video" (2007)Vivian Sobchack, "Inscribing Ethical Space: 10 Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary" (1984)Paul Arthur, "Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments)" (1993)

The Documentary Film Reader

History, Theory, Criticism

Edited by Jonathan Kahana and Foreword by Charles Musser

Author Information

Jonathan Kahana is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary.

The Documentary Film Reader

History, Theory, Criticism

Edited by Jonathan Kahana and Foreword by Charles Musser

Reviews and Awards

"This collection of crucial and often hard-to-find writings will be of immense help in identifying some of the key preoccupations of documentary and dispersing some of its most persistent myths." --David MacDougall, author of The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses

"Kahana puts flesh to the bare bones of film history. These are essays that make the present vibrate with the steady drumbeat of a past we may not fully know but dare not entirely forget. It will serve as a standard reference for what has gone before and a powerful stimulus for what has yet to come well into the foreseeable future." --Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary, 2nd Edition

"Gathering such a range of thought on non-fiction film theory and practice in one volume is simply phenomenal. This is a must-read book, giving precious insight into the ideologies, trends, and evolutions of the documentary genre throughout the world, from its emergence to the present." --Jean-Marie Teno, director of Africa, I Will Fleece You (Afrique, je te plumerai)

"Kahana has curated a rambunctious oratorio of a reader, abundant with sharp discoveries and startling wisdom and surprising conversations across decades and borders. Every aspiring filmmaker should keep a copy in her backpack." --John Greyson, director of Fig Trees